The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand

Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. That psychic discomfort is the price we pay for basic civic peace. It's worth it. It's a pragmatic principle. Defend everyone else's rights, because if you don't there is no one to defend yours. --MaxedOutMama

The most glaring example of the cognitive dissonance on the left is the concept that human beings are inherently good, yet at the same time cannot be trusted with any kind of weapon, unless the magic fairy dust of government authority gets sprinkled upon them.--Moshe Ben-David

The cult of the left believes that it is engaged in a great apocalyptic battle with corporations and industrialists for the ownership of the unthinking masses. Its acolytes see themselves as the individuals who have been "liberated" to think for themselves. They make choices. You however are just a member of the unthinking masses. You are not really a person, but only respond to the agendas of your corporate overlords. If you eat too much, it's because corporations make you eat. If you kill, it's because corporations encourage you to buy guns. You are not an individual. You are a social problem. --Sultan Knish

All politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war. --Billy Beck

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Quote of the Day - Discord & Confusion Edition

Richard Epstein per Reason Magazine: "Epstein splits faculty appointments at the University of Chicago and New York University; he's also a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and a contributor to Reason. In books such as Forbidden Grounds: The Case Against Employment Discrimination Laws (1992) to Simple Rules for a Complex World (1995), and Skepticism and Freedom: A Modern Case for Classical Liberalism (2003), Epstein pushes his ideas and preconceptions to their limits and takes his readers along for the ride. A die-hard libertarian who believes the state should be limited and individual freedom expanded, he is nonetheless the consummate intellectual who first and foremost demands he offer up ironclad proofs for his characteristically counterintuitive insights into law and social theory." As an example, they say, "His 1985 volume, Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domainis a case in point. Epstein made the hugely controversial argument that regulations and other government actions such as environmental regulations that substantially limit the use of or decrease the value of property should be thought of as a form of eminent domain and thus strictly limited by the Constitution. The immediate result was a firestorm of outrage followed by an acknowledgment that the guy was onto something."As Epstein told Reason in a 1995 interview, 'I took some pride in the fact that [Sen.] Joe Biden (D-Del.) held a copy of Takings up to a hapless Clarence Thomas back in 1991 and said that anyone who believes what's in this book is certifiably unqualified to sit in on the Supreme Court. That's a compliment of sorts.... But I took even more pride in the fact that, during the Breyer hearings [in 199X], there were no such theatrics, even as the nominee was constantly questioned on whether he agreed with the Epstein position on deregulation as if that position could not be held by responsible people.'"

All the ingenuity of gimmicks fails...We have more debt, more unemployment, and less happiness in this country now because Hope & Change turns out to be Discord & Confusion. And there's no way that you can stop that. You cannot stop the blunders of one government program by putting another one on top of it. That's what I learned in the Yale Law School. You don't like what the minimum wage does, you create a welfare program. You don't like what a welfare program does, you have a back-to-work program. If you just got rid of the minimum wage, you'd get rid of three programs and you'd free up lots of economies, and what people have to understand is that Mies van der Rohe was essentially a political theorist when he said "Less is More." You get more production out of fewer regulations, and one of the great tragedies of the modern stuff is that you spend all this time on monetary and fiscal policy, where regulatory policy taken in the round and taken in particular cases is every bit as important.

Yup. That's got to make the Denizens of D.C. recoil in abject horror, screaming "Heresy! Heresy!"

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